28 March 2012 5:14 PM

In the late 1990s politics in Wales went rather European, and the local Labour Party started to follow the Tony Blair line that the EU represented the future for the 'progressive' left. Venerable figures, such as Neil Kinnock, schooled in hatred of 'Europe' as a bankers' club had to change their ways and their thoughts. Part of the allure was the Jacques Delors vision of a continent in which trades unions could once again play an important political role- but the money was pretty important too.

'Objective 1' was a massive programme funded by the EU Commission and designed to alleviate poverty and promote economic growth in those European regions which had been hardest hit by the decline of heavy industry from the mid- 20th century onwards. Defining the exact geographical boundaries of these areas proved to be controversial and difficult- since even the poorest regions have pockets of comparative prosperity. In the case of Wales some politicians seemed to want the whole country defined as a disaster area and therefore a suitable recipient for Objective 1 monies.

Eventually, the south Wales valleys and west Wales were declared the winners in the contest to be top of the misery league. And there was enough evidence of socio-economic trauma to support that judgement. The money started to roll in, and the magnitude of the sums are worth dwelling on. £1.2 billion in 2000-6 was matched, under EU rules, by an equal amount from the Welsh Assembly and UK government. 'Objective 1' carried on under a new name from 2006 onwards,with the EU's 'Convergence' programme producing £1bn of European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) money together with £690 million from the European Social Fund ( ESF). This again was matched by Assembly and UK government sources to produce a total of some £3.5 billion. So from 2000 onwards an aid package amounting to a little under £6 billion in its entirety was spent on the worthy and necessary goal of economic development in the Valleys and West Wales.

The recent release of data measuring GDP in these regions means we can calculate the effectiveness of the aid programme. In 2005 GDP per head of the population in the two areas, and expressed as a percentage of the European average, was 79%. The real shocker of a statistic is the fact that in 2009 things had got far worse- and that the same analysis yielded a GDP which was 68.4% of the Euro average. Northern Ireland and Scotland- areas which usually compete with Wales as under-performing economies- weigh in at 83% and 107.5% respectively for 2009. Scotland therefore seems to be pulling away from the all European average, and is not far off the figure for the UK as a whole. In 2009 GDP per head of the population in the UK was 110.7% of the Euro-average.

What went wrong in Wales ? It is not possible to plead, as Welsh politicians have been doing, that the recession hit hard. The downturn was an all-European phenomenon in 2008-9. And the European average GDP diminished accordingly. What we have here therefore is a comparison with other European areas which have also suffered because of the recession. Other European regions which qualified for Objective 1 status and the Convergence programme money managed to increase their GDP percentages and get closer to the EU average. The south Wales valleys and west Wales join just three other instances where that did not happen- and where the economy deteriorated despite the aid package: Malta, two regions of Portugal, and four areas in southern Italy. Greece has become, most unfairly, a whipping boy recently for the failure in European economic and fiscal strategy.But it's worth pointing out that all the Greek regions did better than the two Welsh ones.

It is also irrelevant, and stupid, to complain that the figures do not take into account the economic productivity of commuters who work in Cardiff but who live in the Valleys. Cardiff does, comparatively, boom and parts of the southern valleys have become commuter suburbs. But the whole point of the EU programme was to improve the valleys' own economy, and the GDP statistic is therefore an accurate, albeit melancholy, reflection of the area's economy.

'Objective 1' was, rather tediously, the phrase on most Welsh political lips a decade or so ago. This was hailed as a'once-in-a-generation' chance to fix the Welsh economy and get things moving. Even then it seemed, to realists, utopian to place such faith in an external force while neglecting the real structural problems: a miserable education system, family chaos and social breakdown, and a political system which is so consensus-minded that it refuses to look at reality in the face. Just two hours drive west from central London lies a scene of such misery that it seems best, to some, not to have to think about it at all.

The £6 billion that was wasted should, in any wellrun country, be the subject of a government inquiry. But since it was the Welsh Assembly government that administered the money that will not be happening any time soon. About two-thirds of the Objective 1 money went to projects run by Assembly government's own organisations and by Local Authorities, and £190 million was spent on training and educational courses run by Wales's further and higher education bodies. Once it disappeared within the winding ways of that bureaucracy the money was just used to keep the training and skill organisations in business - the very organisations that are part of the Welsh economic problem.

Businesses themselves should have got a much more hefty amount of the money available. In 2000-6 just 92 of them received a total of £98.9 million- some four per cent therefore of the total aid package available during that period.

Devolved Wales is a very strange place- with its politics and economy having become practically invisible to the rest of the UK. The story of how £6 billion made things worse received hardly any attention in England, while in Wales itself it is rapidly being swept under the carpet. The Welsh public class occasionally go through the motions of recognising that the economy is a disaster area, but they fail to do any serious thinking about genuine alternatives.

When Plaid Cymru had a leadership election recently all three candidates made renewable energy the centre piece of their manifestos- as if the rolling waves, the rainfall and the winds might be the all-encompassing answer to an economic crisis. And when the winner in the contest, Leanne Wood, tried to explain the origins of her country's decline she resorted to strange musings about how wealth created in Wales had been allowed to leave the country.

So which thief arrived in the night and spirited the money away? Where did it come from and where did it go ? Perhaps Ms. Wood proposes a policy of economic protectionism with armed guards on the Severn Bridge searching for the fugitive cash and the wicked robbers?Would she like to see Wales surrounded by a wall of tariffs ? Mercantilism tried to combine patriotism with prosperity in the 17th century by excluding foreign trade. It was indeed quite the thing in the councils of European princes until Adam Smith and free trade came along and blew mercantilism out of the water. So is Plaid Cymru's new leader the first mercantilist to emerge in British politics for over three centuries ? It would be good to know. But it would be even better if Wales's leaders were to cease their escapist ways and embark on some rigorous, mentally audacious and frivolity-free thinking about their nation's renewal.

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13 March 2012 2:10 PM

Some of the Christian churches are going through one of their spasmodic bouts of silliness about homosexuality. Bishops and archbishops are raising a banner in defence of the traditional,heterosexual, interpretation of marriage. Commentators of varying stripe are defending the institution as a 'building block' without which society will fall apart. And our gay- friendly prime minister has pledged himself to advance the cause of 'gay marriage' as the next step to equality now that same sex civil unions are so widespread as to be uncontroversial.

A pattern has established itself. Social practices and attitudes change and evolve. Law sometimes struggles to keep up with those changes- and sometimes it pushes them on. But the types of Christianity that are keenest on keeping up with tradition ( Catholicism, the Russian and Greek Orthodox, and some Anglicans- especially the evangelicals) can't cope with gayness. The same is true of Orthodox Judaism- as opposed to the Reformed and Liberal traditions. Judaeo-Christian branches of monotheism join with another of Abraham's progeny- Islam- in a witless struggle to keep the gay at bay.

The contest is futile. A few years ago priestly voices were rejecting the idea of civil unions. That battle having been lost they now retreat further inside the dogmatic fortress. And on gay marriage too they will lose the battle. This is a contest that enfeebles and isolates the churches. Its most important single consequence is secularisation since advanced and liberal societies are concluding that Christianity is weird, reactionary and sex-obsessed. Since there's such a lot of bad history involved in this melancholy debate it may be worth while setting the record straight.

Christians should pay attention to what the Founder said. The fact that he had hardly anything to say about sex- whether gay or straight-ought to matter. There was a woman who was 'taken in adultery'- but the wholeness of her faith redeemed her. She was told to go and sin no more. And that is just about it. An early first century Jew living in Palestine- a rabbi who taught in the tradition of the Law and the Prophets- may or may not have come across evidence of Graeco-Roman gay sex in his particular corner of the Roman empire in the east. All we know is that he did not think it relevant enough to rate a mention.

The churches like to talk about 'Christian marriage' but Christ himself did not. What evidence we have suggests- pretty strongly-that he came with a (metaphorical) sword which was aimed at dislodging comfortable assumptions about ourselves. He prophesied the coming of the Kingdom of God- an end-of-time which had little to do with Mummy and Daddy. The Christian Church has always found Christ to be an uncomfortable presence in its midst- which is why it has often tried to domesticate him. Marriage is a great institution in which to bring up children and it also serves to canalise the carnal instincts. But these are not insights that are specific to Christianity, and Christ rejected the family into which he was born once he embarked on his preaching ministry. When church leaders opine about how marriage makes a society stable and happy they are in fact advancing a secular message rather than an uniquely Christian one. Marriage's virtues have nothing to do with the Christian gospel. Preaching that gospel though is so tough a job in 2012 that getting shouty about marriage is bound to appeal as a soft-headed alternative option.

'Marriage'- in its Christian form- is certainly a sacrament. But it took the Church a long time to acclaim it as such. The 12th century is a time when the Latin Church in the west was defining itself in conscious opposition to secular powers. And that is when the seven sacraments become an explicit feature of church life. Marriage then joined all the others: baptism,confession, the eucharist, confession, extreme unction (when about to die), and holy orders or priesthood. It is also true to say that in Christian practice some sacraments are more sacramental than others. Baptism and the eucharist have a special status since these are the only two sacraments we know to have been instituted by Christ.

Christian lives and practices have changed in the past two thousand years. And what counts as Christian doctrine has therefore also changed. Church leaders seem to have little difficulty in understanding this where hetero-sex is concerned. Within living memory- and certainly well into the 1970s- many church leaders descibed cohabiting couples as" living in sin" if they did not marry. And their sexual relations were categorised as 'fornication'. A very large number of couples who now get married according to the Christian rites have been cohabiting- as Prince William and Kate Middleton did. But reproachful talk of 'living in sin' has been abandoned even by very conservative churchmen. That amounts to a huge change in official Christian attitudes, though it is not one that many churchmen choose to dwell upon. Hundreds of years of preachiness about the wickedness of heterosexual sex before marriage has disappeared from Christian teaching. It's a fair bet that the Bishop of London- a very traditional priest- did not choose to preach to the prince about 'fornication' when he instructed the royal couple before their marriage.

Marriage's ancient history pre-dates Christianity. Graeco-Romans did it before the first century AD and so did ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Sumerians and Akkadians. Those heterosexual unions were often blessed by priests. In which case, perhaps Ebor and Cantuar- along with Southwark and St. Andrew's- might be inclined to praise these building blocks of a splendidly pagan society ? These learned clerics also seem to have forgotten that the Church's own history throws up occasional evidence of same-sex rites.

Adelphopoiesis ( or 'brother- making') was a well-attested ceremony with its own liturgy in the early history of the Orthodox church- and there are texts that survive from the fourth century. These were not, in all probability, marriage ceremonies of the kind that heterosexual couples went in for. Pagan religion in the ancient Mediterranean- as well as in Germanic societies- recognised 'blood-brotherhood' especially between warriors who swore pacts of loyaty to each other. Christianity frowned on the practice and adelphopoiesis could have been the Church's way of taking over the rite and denuding it of its pagan element. But the texts that survive do make it clear that this was a same sex ritual, explicilty affirmed in terms of an affection and commitment that go some way beyond the norms of a warrior society

It is Parliament rather than with the Church which will shape the future evolution of marriage. We will eventually have secular gay marriages-and they will be distinguished from Christian sacramental marriages which will be confined to heterosexuals. The rights of the one need not impinge on the other. And at a later stage still, when Christianity has come to its senses and chosen to carry on evolving, gay marriages will become sacramental rites.

The Archbishop of York has attempted one last blast of reaction. Marriage, he suggests, can not be changed since its definition as an union between a man and a woman forms part of the Book of Common Prayer- and that is a document ratified by an Act of Parliament. The BCP may be lovely prose but it has long since ceased to be central to Anglican life and worship. Unless the archbishop proposes that the C of E return to a steadfast embrace of all 39 Articles which also form part of the BCP- including opposition to divorce in all circumstances ( not to mention dear old 'fornication')? Besides which York seems to have forgotten one basic constitutional principle: no parliament can bind its successor. What parliament has done it can also undo. And when that has happened in the case of marriage the priestly voices will then find I daresay another hopeless cause to defend as constituting the very essence of Christian identity. Perhaps it's time for the Church to embrace slavery as an ideal ?

It's a natural tendency to praise the nation - her traditions and history - on the patronal saint's day. And in the case of Wales - on St. David's Day - there are plenty of reasons for rejoicing. Not since the 1970's has the national rugby team gained such consistent successes. And the Welsh show a confident and sucessful face to the world in the performing arts - on the stage, in literature, and in music- whether classical or contemporary. Here is an ancient cultural tradition which finds its roots in the early middle ages- and which has shown an astonishing capacity to survive and renew itself. And yet- despite all the performative brilliance of this pearl of European civilisation there are also plenty of reasons to worry about the state of contemporary Wales.

If you cross the Severn Bridge and travel for quite a few miles along the M4 it's easy to imagine that you're still in the Thames Valley corridor. Green field sites, light engineering works and comfortable suburbs seem to suggest a Home Counties milieu.

But if you leave the motorway and travel just a few miles to the north you will find yourself surrounded by a true socio-economic tragedy - one of the worst in Europe. Most of the Welsh population is concentrated in the south-east, and long term patterns of work and employment prospects have all but disappeared from the region's valleys- an area that once hummed with industrial and cultural vitality. It was heavy industry- coal as well as steel and iron- that created that marvellous culture with its chapels, its singing and literary festivals- and also its distinctive style of fast-flowing rugby. Once the heavy industry left nothing else really arrived to take its place, and it's not at all unusual to find two or three generations of the unemployed in the same family. All the other ailments flow from that blight of unemployment. Wales is now the poorest part of Britain; statistics for long term ailments are frigteningly high, and Welsh education - once so celebrated - has long since been knocked off its pedestal.

It is, perhaps, easy to condemn. Though it's still true that commentators and elected politicians in Wales- the country's public class- tend to avoid serious consideration of the awkward truths about Wales. But before deciding what ought to be done in order to improve this debilitating Welsh condition it's necessary to find its cause. And if there is one fact that matters above all others in that diagnostic it is this one: government expenditure accounts for 64% of Wales's national income. This is a country that has a pre-modern economy, and the dominance of the public sector is so great that it sometimes seems impossible to come across anyone who isn't working for the state in some capacity or other.

Stratosperically high levels of public expenditure are no mere reflection of a socio-economic anguish - they in fact contribute to it. Public sector dominance exerts a stranglehold on Welsh energy and inventiveness, and it leads to that apathy whuch is such a feature of the contemporary Welsh consciousness. For the best part of a century Wales decided to be governed by just one party- and even when Labour was in opposition in Westminster it carried on ruling Wales locally. The result was an intellectual poverty whose long term and destructive effects were even wore than material deprivation. Wales's failure to adapt to a post-industrial world is directly attributable to Welsh Labour's persistent tradition of intolerance- and its habit of intransigent and unimaginative government. Consciousness determines the kind of world you live in. Wales's society and economy needs a heavy infusion of the inventive energy which is displayed in its literary, artistic and performative culture.

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29 February 2012 4:37 PM

From the early 1990s onwards Britain embarked on a massive expansion of university education. There were two aspects to this policy. From the late 1980s onwards polytechnic principals had been waging a campaign for ( as they saw it ) an upgrade. The term 'polytechnic' had been fashionable in the 1960s but was now thought to denote an inferior form of higher education. With a vice-chancellorial gleam in their eyes the poly principals mounted a formidable campaign to ensure a change of name.

Polytechnics would now become universities, and at the stroke of a pen (or an 'Order in Council') over half of all those engaged in higher education would be transformed into 'university students'. As Education Secretary it was Kenneth Clarke who prepared the ground for this transformation. It was difficult to resist a plan approved of by practically everybody who ran a British polytechnic. And Clarke was an enthusiast for the scheme.

Sceptics about the rebranding thought that changing the name was bound to lead to a dilution of university standards. Clarke responded to the criticisms with characteristic insouciance. The sceptics were told that they were just being snobs. Besides which, the principals of the polytechnics had given assurances. Their institutions had been founded to give technical education a much needed boost in Britain- and they were pledged to continue that mission while flying under an university banner. Once they got their way the new vice-chancellors ( equipped with upgraded salaries and budgets) ignored the promises they had made. The new universities had to be properly 'academic'- but in a way that would suit the world of wider access. Technical education was replaced by a plethora of neo-academic courses such as media studies. The sceptics had pointed out to Clarke that this was a likely development and, having been ignored, they were proved right.

This was the situation that was inherited by the incoming Labour government in 1997. And the second stage of the university story involved a spending splurge on a scale not seen in Britain since the major university expansion of the 1960s. Until a few years ago it was thought that the expansion in student numbers and the extra spending on budgets would of themselves ensure a wider access to higher education. Trickle-down would work its magic, and there would be an increased number of students from working class and blue collar households. The fact that this has not happened- and that it is the offspring of the middle classes who have benfited from the university reforms- is the background to the current panic about ' fair access'.

This debate encourages a lot of heat and not enough light. Cliches multiply in a field of tired metaphors. 'Fairness' begs the question. 'Access' brings to mind wheelchairs and public buildings rather than centres of learning. 'Breadth, 'depth' and 'rigour' may be powerfully suggestive in the age of the gym and the personal trainer- but their meaning as measurements of the life of the mind is opaque. And ' social engineering' whether 'crude' or otherwise should be consigned to the scrap heap of tired phraseology ( where it can join 'political correctness gone mad').

Critics of the regulatory world of access and its reliance on quotas have a good case. But they forget that all universities at all stages in their history have fulfilled social functions, and that the selection of students is always 'engineered'. Chinese academies of higher education predate the European university and the Confucian syllabus aimed to produce scholar-bureaucrats who served in government. The universities that were founded in medieval Europe from the 1080s onwards emerged from the pre-existing monastic and cathedral schools, and the kind of education that they provided - in law, medicine and philosophy as well as theology- responded to a new demand. The household governments of royal princes were becoming more complex. And the lay clerks that emerged from Bologna and Montpellier, Paris and Naples, Oxford and Cambridge, found jobs in the newly expanded households where they staffed the exchequer and served in the chanceries. Until well into the 19th century the central role of Oxford and Cambridge was to educate men for careers as Anglican clergy- a job with an educational and social dimension within the parish structure. These were all highly 'engineered' consequences.

Universities therefore do not just exist in a world where 'excellence' is its own reward, and their social value has always been 'engineered' - that is to say calculated in order to serve certain specific needs. The only question to be asked is whether the engineering is valuable.

Most observers would agree that universities ought to select on the basis of talent and potential. Given the collapse in state education and the dodgy nature of public examinations universities have a new problem on their hands. How to detect and measure true potential ? Attention to context ( or' matrix' as the jargon has it) is unavoidable. A fluent and confident Etonian may be like an over-bred greyhound. Having been trained for competition since infancy he may lack the stamina to go much further. And the intellectually curious sixth former from the under-achieving comprehensive - although weighing in with less than starry grades- is often the better bet in the long ( and the university) term.

These though are judgements that ought to be made by universities themselves and not by an intrusive regulator. Any system of reform that relies on quotas determined by socio-economic data is doomed to failure. No organisation is capable of accumulating the amount of data required in order to do justice to so wide a variety of individuals. And the attempt at implementing it would be subverted by all the dodges known to the pushy and manipulative.

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09 February 2012 7:08 PM

Why do universities exist? Are they there a) to bear aloft the lamp of learning and extend the boundaries of knowledge by means of research, publication and teaching ? Or b) do they exist to improve the job prospects- and therefore the future social standing- of the students who follow university courses?

The sensible answer surely is that they do both. And that b) is frequently a result of a). Intellectually demanding courses, if pursued successfully, can qualify students for well-paid jobs. Bright people enjoy difficulty and will want to carry on challenging themselves after graduating. Complexity can be its own reward: many university researchers- especially in some areas of applied science and law- would earn more money in a commercial environment. But they prefer the university ambience- at the moment anyway. However, were Professor Leslie ('Les') Ebdon of the University of Bedfordshire to have his way our finest universities would slide their way irreversibly down the international league tables.

Professor Ebdon is now in his mid-sixties and coming up to retirement. He is an example of a pretty familiar kind of university bureaucrat- the scientist who turns to admin. in mid-career and prospers in the acronym jungle. Ebdon is a chemist- and he started promisingly enough with an undergraduate and a postgraduate degree at Imperial College,London- one of our finest seats of learning. And he came on the job market at a time- in the early 1970s-when universities were still expanding in some areas. Ebdon's progress took him to Sheffield Polytechnic and afterwards to Plymouth which emerged from its polytechnocratic chrysalis and became an university in the early 1990s. He then moved on to the campuses at Bedford and Luton which, having also shed the poly label,became the University of Bedfordshire. Thus far then, thus smooth.

Ebdon has an easy command of university 'wider access' jargon, and that has endeared him to dullard politicians of all parties- including his latest patrons: Vince Cable the Business Secretary and his number two in that department- David Willetts. They have nominated him to 'Chair' OFFA- not alas the mighty Mercian king but one of those ghastly government agencies that spring from the ground when governments decide that something needs to be done but they don't know how to do it.

OFFA is there to promote 'fair access'- and it exists because we have a genuine problem in our universities. When it comes to social mobility Britain is a real shocker. If you are born poor here then the chances of your staying poor are far higher than in any other west European country. We once had an aspirational working class which thought that a good education was the way to get on. That class has almost completetely disappeared from British soil. Indeed, the 'working class' itself barely exists any more since the heavy industry that gave employment to its members is no more. What we have instead is a vast class of 'the new poor' and those born to poverty hardly ever get to university. Britain suffers from a huge internal brain drain- with the potential of bright children disappearing down the plug hole.

This is a social catastrophe- miserable for the marginalised and incredibly expensive for our country as a whole in terms of under-used mental capacity. So what do we do about it?

OFFA- and 'Ebdonology' ( the mental processes that underpin the Ebdon career) offer just about the worst possible solution. 'Ebdonology' has its moments of promise when it talks of getting universities to offer bursaries to the poor. And running 'outreach projects' can't be all bad- though well-intentioned universities have been doing that for many years and the results are at best patchy. Ebdonological science is still in its infancy but I think we can already detect what OFFA officers might call its 'direction of travel' -one in which 'outcomes' will be measured and 'inputs' calibrated once programmes have been 'rolled out' while going -of course-'forward'.

Masters in Ebdonology will force universities to sign 'access agreements' which will determine how many of the poor ( aka 'socially disadvantaged') ought to get university places. If universities refuse to make special provision they will be punished and fined. They can avoid such penalties if they lower their entry requirements and grade offers on a socially selective ( Ebdonologically-selected) basis in recognition of the fact that some applicants have been badly taught by stupid teachers.

Even in the multi-disciplinary, gender-sensitive, inter-curricular chaos that is the modern university in action Ebdonology stands out as a topsy-turvy bogus discipline. Britain's education system needs radical reform- and the root is where the corruption is to be found. That means that it is the schools that have to be changed in the first place- so that they produce a generation of the young who do not require the dubious patronage of OFFA.

Ebdonology is 60s sociology by another name- and similalry malodorous. It presupposes that the mastermind at an OFFA desk can possess all the knowledge necessary in order to promote social advance through education. That he ( or she- since all of this will be 'genderised' to an acute degree) will be able to adjudicate what is fair or unfair on the basis of each applicant's social background and school performance. Anyone who thinks that that kind of centralisation of knowledge is either desirable- or possible-has to be stupid as well as entirely innocent of the catastrophic effects of similar mass programmes of centralisation and nationalisation in the second half of the twentieth century in Britain.

OFFA under Ebdon will create social injustice by depriving really able candidates of the places they clearly deserve at major universities. And it will undermine what little residual independence universities still have. Universities such as Ebdon's own Bedfordshire will benefit - while those who have to compete in a more international market will suffer. They do not of course have to put up with this drivel. The day when Oxford and Cambridge- along with a handful of other leading British universities- become independent draws ever near.

The select committe on 'Business,Innovation and Skills' did a good day's work this week when it tried to block Les Ebdon's appointment. But the signs are that Vince Cable will press on regardless. Hiving away responsibility for the universities from the Education department to the Business department always was a stupid idea and a reflection of the kind of philistinism that has wrecked British education. That decision needs to be reversed- and universities should once again be regarded as educational institutions rather than as pawns to be deployed in the advancement of Ebdonology.

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08 February 2012 5:29 PM

'Dickensian' is an over-worked adjective because the author's life and work can be quarried in so many different ways. Dickens first sprang to prominence as a quick thinking and fast writing journalist, and the sketches he wrote as a correspondent at the law courts showed a keen grasp of the preening pomposity of public figures. He was also an instinctive man of the theatre at a time when the playhouse was a major form of entertainment for the masses as well as the elite- in the provincial towns and cities as well as in London. And the novels are fondly remembered for those individual scenes of high drama, revelations of personality and twists of the plot which owe a lot to Dickens's playgoing habits: Sykes at bay on the rooftops for example and Pip's discovery of his benefactor.

'Dickensian' characters are drawn broadly and vigorously- and they fall into two camps: genial, life-affirming and generous- or mean-spirited,scheming and vindictive. He wrote quickly and to order- with a fluency which encouraged a facile approach. So there was not much time for subtlety when it came to characterisation. Dickens was a commercial-minded, even materialistic, individual. He knew that he wrote for money, and he understood what the readers liked- vivid plots, quick thrills, and personalities both loathsome and lovable. These days he would be a script writer for Eastenders.

Although not born in London he quickly came to think of himself as a Londoner- so 'Dickensian' is a word bound up with the city's image of itself as a bustling, thrusting, get up and go, sharp-elbowed kind of place. But he is the creator of a national stereotype as well as a civic one. So 'Dickensian' means having a sense of humour and not taking ideas too seriously. The novels are sometimes affecting but often incorrigibly sentimental- the suggestion being that life's problems can be sorted out if we recognise that we are all in this together, and that we should row in the same boat having first of all ensured an outburst of niceness in order to transform the national condition. This tedious uplift can try a reader's patience.

Dickens's life showed the same kind of setimentality we observe in the novels. He cracked jokes, liked parties and cried easily. Like many sentimentalists he was also cruel. As a greater artist, Oscar Wilde, once wrote: '' A sentimentalist is a cynic on a bank holiday.' He married his wife on the way up and then abandoned her once he got there since she was fat and boring. An expert on detecting hypocrisy in others Dickens was oblivious to his own performance in that department of life. Many artists are private monsters- and they get away with it since they do not preach. But a Dickens novel is often an extended sermon on the need to be good. He cottoned on- novelistically- to the fact that character and behaviour matter a lot in England. He exploited that trait commercially, but his nastiness as a family man exposes him to hypocrisy.

Many enjoy The Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, and Great Expectations- though I suspect most people nowadays only know these works through film and tv dramatisations. He was a child-like person himself and so the portrayals of childhood are the most enchanting features of the oeuvre. But most of Dickens's other novels are verbose and dull. I would be amazed if more than a few dozen subjects of the present Queen struggled through, say, Barnaby Rudge in the last twelve months. He wrote for the monthlies and quarterlies, and so his books mostly appeared initially in serialised form. That explains their sprawling nature. Those hundreds of thousands of words in a single Dickens novel have little aesthetic unity, and that is why they are remembered for their individual scenes rather than as an integrated whole. In death he soon became a great English 'character' but most of those who drone on about him- and there will be all too many of them in the bicentenary of his birth-confine themselves to a reading of, at most, five or six of the novels.

Posthumously, Dickens was taken up by the left-liberal English consenus of the 20th century. He was an entirely secular figure-and therefore eminently suitable for that enrollment. And the fact that he was so relentlessly urban a figure was also a handy qualification for entry into that stage army. Despite the early impact of industralisation England from the 1840s to the 1860s (the decades of Dickens's mature self-expression) remained a mostly rural society. But he had no knowledge of the English countryside and was unsympathetic to its hierachies. The Dickens novels are a minority report on the national condition written by a cockney who looks at most of England from a stage coach or a railway carriage.

Being hypocritical about capitalism was surely the aspect of Dickens's character that most endeared him to the left. He negotiated his contracts extremely well, and then sermonised on the horrors of a materialistic society. And so 'Dickensian' also means malnutrition, illiteracy, and an early grave for the poor. This anti-capitalist parody of early and mid-Victorian England was, until quite recently, a standard textbook view of the period. It is one of the many ways in which boring old Fabianism was able to limp on in the lecture theatres and school rooms of England

Poor Nick Gibb, the education minister, stumbles into this banality when he bewails the 'Dickensian' levels of illiteracy in our schools. Church schools in the nineteenth century did a better job of educating the poor than state schools have done in the past fifty years. By the 1890s the population of Britain had attained almost universal literacy and numeracy. A hundred and twenty years later- one in six of all eleven year olds are described in public sector weasel-speak as 'not fluent readers' . They are in fact illiterate. The real England of Dickens's day would have done more to liberate them, but an acknowledgement of that fact would not be at all 'Dickensian.'

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20 January 2012 3:19 PM

International comparisons have been a feature of Britain's education debate from the 1970s onwards. Our schools and colleges were under-performing and the contrast with parts of continental Europe helped to define the nature of the problem. The French lycee and the German gymnasium were both of them selective institutions, and both academic and technical education prospered as a result in those countries. The British comprehensive just could not compete.

European comparisons are still relevant- and especially so the contrast with Germany. Europe's most successful economy, together with its emphasis on manufacturing exports, is based on really high quality technical education. But in recent years there's been a shift to a more cosmopolitan angle when discussing what needs to be done. Britain has a more global perspective than most other European countries in regard to its economy- and this is now true of its education debate as well.

South-east Asia's economies can no longer be described as merely "emerging". They have arrived and are Britain's direct competitors when it comes to productivity, innovation and labour costs. Working conditions in these new economies were once compared, fairly enough, to Britain's factory system at a time when it too was embarking on early industrialisation. And, just as happened in Britain during the late 19th century, continued industrial and commercial progress has created a demand for a more specialised and educated work force.

The educational systems of many Asian countries now provide the statistics that are calculated to shame us into action. These are all societies that have recognised that human capital is the single most important element in securing material progress. And if your country is not blessed with great natural resources, as in Singapore for example, all you are left with is the labour force: get that right and prosperity can still follow.

These comparisons instill a a sense of urgency. We have now been talking about how and why Britain's schools fell by the wayside for an awfully long time. It was Jim Callaghan who proposed, as prime minister, a " great debate" on these issues, and thirty- four years is a long time to spend on a conversation. The debate tends to stall though for a very good reason: action is always harder than words.

What do schools in South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong have in common? They tend to be less noisy than their British equivalents. Children sit at desks which are arranged in rows, and they all face in the same direction-towards a teacher who instructs. Arithmetical tables are memorised and calculators are banned. Spelling, grammar and syntax are taught, and artless self-expression is not regarded as a substitute for accuracy. Having been taught the basics the children will be able to express themselves fluently. Opinions then become interesting and worth listening to.

These are, in other words, the kind of schools that Britain had in the first half of the twentieth century and that were then killed off. Primary schools in this country are now incredibly noisy. Desks are mostly arranged in little circles, a teacher wanders around the room aimlessly, and the 'project-based' work pursued by chattering tots seems almost as endless as Britain's great education debate. The contrast between these two kinds of classrooms is in fact the difference between an advancing society and a declining one. One is purposeful and disciplined, the other is miserable and confused.

But having observed this chasm we are still left with an awesome practical question. How can we change? Michael Gove's speeches on these issues are mostly admirable. But both his supporters and his detractors ignore one very important fact. An education minister in Britain is like a constitutional monarch. He can warn and advise, suggest and discourage- and these are important in setting the terms of the debate. But he has very little direct administrative power. If he wishes to change the working practices in schools he has to work through, and with, the schools' inspectorate. Which is why the appointment of Michael Wishart as Chief Inspector was so very important. A Secretary of State can also effect changes in the curriculum. Progress in this area though has been glacial. The British curriculum would benefit from the Singaporean attention to basics, and that has to be enforced by public examination rather than by the ticking of boxes in end of term tests. If he goes down this route Mr Gove will be accused of being an authoritarian- but that is the only path left.

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16 January 2012 5:26 PM

Teaching has always been a strange kind of 'profession'. Individual teachers may undoubtedly be accomplished as scientists, historians, linguists, or mathematicians. They earn the right to be regarded as professional in this regard because they have mastered a large and complex body of knowledge. Their advice carries weight because they know their way around the discipline concerned.

But the idea that teaching itself- the techniques involved in the transmission of knowledge- might be regarded as a body of knowledge has always encountered resistance. Doctors, accountants and lawyers are professionals because they have spent a long time studying a discipline which is pretty objective. There are debates about the implications of taxation regulations and about how to interpret the laws passed by parliament. Similarly, doctors often disagree with each other about what might be the correct course of treatment for a patient. But in each of these cases there is at its core a discipline which needs to be understood before its students can really be called "professional". Teaching though is not really like that.

The difficult bit in education lies with the nature of the individual academic subject- how to understand an algebraic equation or handle a piece of historical evidence. You can't go on to teach effectively as a mathematician or an historian unless you've grasped those skills.But the techniques or abilities that make a great teacher- how to command attention, attain discipline,convey and inspire enthusiasm- can't be described as a body of knowledge. These are personal qualities and quite often they are more caught than taught. And the attempt to turn 'education' into a stand alone subject has had some pretty unfortunate consequences in the second half of the 20th century.

The self-esteem of teachers seemed to be bound up with that enterprise. But the zeal to professionalise threw up a lot of bogus theory. Sociological prejudices about equality were really subjective but, once turned into a curriculum studied by would-be teachers, they could appear to be a proper discipline.

This 'professionalisation' kept university departments of education in business. But the courses they ran, and that were intended to 'certificate' teachers, only lasted one year. So there can't have been that much to learn.Teachers' unions have always produced a lot of huffing and puffing about 'professional status' while reserving to themselves the right to endorse strike action- something that real professionals do not do. And they have been incredibly defensive about bad teachers.

Professional councils regularly discipline, and sometimes expel, incompetent members. And that is a trend which has grown in recent years since consumers are now more activist than in the past. Complaints about incompetent lawyers and lazy doctors are taken seriously and the malefactors punished. But up until last week it was practically impossible to sack a teacher who was just not up to the job.

That failure infected the ethos of teaching as a whole. Education secretary Michael Gove sent out all the right signals therefore when he produced new directives: teachers are to be assessed every year and those who fail to perform can be sacked in just one term. Previously, the dismissal process could take up to a whole school year. The preposterous three hour limit to the amount of time a head teacher was allowed to sit in and observe a teacher at work in the classroom is going to be lifted. And the lackadaisical General Teaching Council for England - which previously took the ultimate decision on sacking and disqualifying teachers-will soon be disbanded.

Gove is not winning many plaudits from the teachers' unions at the moment, and that is a sign of his effectiveness and ambition as an education minister. He has brought flair and imagination to bear on the issue of Britain's under-performing schools. In the obtuse world of educational managerialise ' satisfactory' is a term which means ' not exactly over the cliff yet but still rather dreadful' . O.F.S.T.E.D. reports categorise no less than forty per cent of England's state schools as being 'satisfactory' far as teaching is concerned. 'Outstanding' is a label applied by the inspectorate to just four per cent of such schools.

Being professional,as understood by teachers' unions, has become a way of justifying anti-intellectualism and philistinism. It is pleasing to note that it is a Scotsman who has finally started to dismantle these long standing prejudices in English education. They are thought crimes which have condemned thousands of pupils to under-performance and deprived them of the lamps of learning. Gove is reminding teachers that education is about scholarship, thought, and culture. And he is not afraid to use his administrative powers in pursuit of the regeneration of schooling along these demanding lines. It will take, as he has noted, a decade of endeavour to get these things right. If he lasts the course he will turn out to be a figure of lasting significance in the history of English thought.

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09 January 2012 4:20 PM

Sevenoaks seems an unlikely place for the start of a revolution. But the county of Kent has often played a heroically anomalous role in English history. This is the early medieval British/Welsh kingdom of Ceint which was a stronghold of the Cantiaci tribe. Retention of the old British name for the kingdom shows that the Angles and the Saxons who invaded from Germany had to adapt to Kent rather than trample right over it. Elsewhere in south-east Britain the old Brythonic place names vanished from the map. Kent marks the spot that made for a difference.

Traces of the old, pre-Anglo-Saxon order survived for a very long time in the local kingdom, and land laws unique to Kent were still being applied in the early 20th century. In Anglo-Saxon England this was recognised as being rather a special place long after its political independence had been ceded. Kent needed an unusual degree of public recognition if it was to be integrated into the Anglo-Saxon state. And so the tradition was established of granting Kentish levies the high honour of going into battle at the head of the king's army.

We should not be surprised therefore that the county stuck to its grammar school traditions in the late 20th century and that it chose to do battle with central government. Most of the rest of England was swamped by the egalitarian enthusiasms of the comprehensive experiment, but Kentish militancy had its own way of doing things when it came to secondary education. Labour education ministers - and quite a few Tory ones-came to Kent, breathed an ineffectual fire at successive education committees, and then had to withdraw.

Now comes the news that Sevenoaks may become the site of the first grammar school to be established in England in over fifty years. This is a victory for localism- something that was being pursued by the Kent education committee for quite a few decades before political theorists started to prattle about its virtues. And although the new grammar school in Sevenoaks- being an overspill from an over-subscribed school- will not be an autonomous institution this remains an important moment in the history of English education.

The adjective matters. Grammar schools were so called because the first ones were a fruit of the 16th century revival of learning and of that renaissance emphasis on correct grammatical and literary expression. This was the educational system that produced William Shakespeare ( Stratford upon Avon grammar school) and also John Milton ( St.Paul's). Many of the local grammar schools of Tudor times developed into national boarding schools- as happened at Rugby, Shrewsbury and Harrow. But in the early 20th century the grammar school tradition was given a new lease of life when it became central to English educational policy.

Central government can not claim that many successes in the history of 20th century England, but grammar schools are a rare exception to the rule. They were as near to being classless in ethos and meritocratic in aspiration as it possible to be in English circumstances. In the post-1945 world the grammmar school system achieved some of its greatest successes. By that stage well over half of Oxford and Cambridge under-graduates came from state grammar schools, and independent schools were withering on the vine. There was no need to pay for Greyfriars when the local grammar school gave a better education for no fee at all.

The egerness displayed by the Labour government of 1966-70 in dismantling the grammar school system- a tradition of thought and endeavour which could trace its roots to Erasmus- remains baffling. Grammar schools were not perfect. Nothing ever is. The 11 plus exam had its harsh features- though competition is a fact of life and children need to be introduced to its rigours. Secondary modern schools were deprived of money and failed to develop their own rationale. And the third element of the 1944 Education Act- a nation wide system of technical schools- failed to happen.

But grammar schools were destroyed as a result of an ideological fury which, in a rather sad English way, confused class with culture. Grammar schools were supposed to be middle-class, and their ethos was intellectual. The adversaries therefore concluded that both the class system and the cultural aspiration had to be dismantled together. Some education ministers of the 1960s and 1970s sounded like Maoist revolutionaries when they ventilated their spleen against grammar schools. Any idea of reforming grammar schools was completely out of the question. A new order had to be established and that meant root-and-branch destruction of what had gone before.

The true beneficaries of this zealotry were the independent schools who suddenly found a new reason for their existence. The great and ancient public schools were always going to survive, though Eton and Harrow were going through very lean times in the 1960s. Many Greyfriars-type establishments however started to talk about 'academic values' from the 1970s onwards since that was where the future cheque books were to be found. Parents who could afford to pay- and quite a few who were prepared to risk bankruptcy- had to send their children to indpendent schools if their offspring were to have an academic education.

The word 'grammar' seemed set to disappear from English education, and even when selection returned in the 1990s the weasel word 'Academy' had to be resorted to in describing the schools where it prevailed. A huge struggle had to take place before the luminaries of state education were forced to recognise that popular schools had a right to expand. And the idea that less popular schools are doomed to decline- rather than being inspired to greater endeavour- remains a stubborn and weird prejudice. Kent's persistence in sticking to its guns has now been rewarded. The new grammar school in Sevenoaks is a victory for democracy since it will exist as a result of the popular will. It is parents who want it to happen because they think there are not enough grammar schools in Kent- and in asserting their will they are the heirs to those men of Kent who went into battle over a thousand years ago.

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16 December 2011 12:58 PM

Christopher Hitchens, who has died at the age of 62 in the Houston hospital where he had been receiving treatment for cancer, was among the greatest polemicists of his generation. Many writers make the journey from a left wing youth to a right -leaning posture in later adulthood. And Hitchens's support for the military intervention in Iraq- along with his thoroughly disabused view of President Clinton- dismayed many of his erstwhile friends on the political left both in the United States and in Britain. But he was always too original a figure and too much his own man ever to be accommodated easily in the neat little pigeon holes of 'left' and 'right'.

A writer of prose which could be both sinewy and baroque, direct and allusive, as the occasion- and the fee-demanded, Hitchens scattered his literary gifts across an astonishingly wide terrain which extended from the Socialist Worker of the 1970s to the Vanity Fair of today. There was a magnificent continuum to this life and work, and it was communicated by that grand authorial voice which- being so imposingly authoritative -brooked no contradiction. When one read a Hitchens piece the sound and character of the man himself always came through. And just as his accent became ever more plummily English in the years of his American exile, so his assurance about what was right and wrong acquired new depth and definition.

He was, first and foremost, a great English individualist who hated tyranny and cant- and the transition he made to the United States suited him- and his themes- extremely well. The American poliltical and intellectual tradition was founded by those 17th century emigres who left England, and Hitchens's treatment of early 20th century politics offers a powerful reminder of the enduring connections between English and American thought. The puritanism of those ancestors in matters of personal life might not have been the chosen Hitchens facon de vivre- but their contempt for arbitrary rule and determined embrace of the New World lived on in the Hitchen prose. And though this determined foe of Christianity may not have appreciated it- the sonorous alliteration of the King James Bible was surely the greatest single influence on Hitchens's own pursuit of syntactical felicity.

Awareness of how the English are made,and unmade, by their class- consciousness seems to have struck Hitchens at an early age. He reacted against the suburbanising confines of a minor public school education by embracing socialism in its least statist and most bohemian form. At Oxford he became a champagne Trotskyite, an occasional bisexual, and a political agitator whose activism owed little to the formal study of either politics, philosophy or economics. What attracted him was the living of life at its most abundant- together with the savouring of its multiple ironies and paradoxes.

The 1970s- that decade when the established order seemed set to rot from the core- suited Hutchens very well. He had a gift for the pithy phrase and for the swift dispatch of pitiless copy which skewered, amused and provoked- and so he started to attract a mass readership in the Evening Standard as well as a more coterie appeal in the columns of the New Statesman. He chose his themes well since they had public appeal and he knew how to express outrage without being sententious. Early books on Cyprus ( 1984) and the Elgin Marbles ( 1987) showed that Hitchens could do the graft of research and he really hit his stride when he started to attack the Ayatollah Khomeini from 1989 onwards.

The issuing of a fatwah against Salman Rushdie following the publication of the Satanic Verses outraged Hitchens on many levels. Rushdie was a personal friend who was now exposed to danger. But the obscurantist cleric also appalled Hitchens the lover of liberty. Established in the United States since 1981, Hitchens now directed the long distance power of his contempt towards the heresiarch of Qom whose theocratic aspirations threatened to undermine the civilisation of the West. It was this initial campaign that really shifted Hitchens away from the orthodox left whose musings so often expose a readiness to tolerate tyranny. His support for the military action in Iraq over a decade later should really have come as no surprise. For him the political was the personal- as it was for his great hero Thomas Paine, the subject of one of Hitchens's very finest books ( 2002). Societies were redeemed by the actions of individually good human beings- and they were exposed to threat when human wickedness gained power. This was the truth as Hitchens, the English radical, saw it- and it gave a moral depth to his polemical fury. Diring the last year of his life, as Hitchens became increasingly weaker phyically, the power of his prose was undimned, and the communication of his passion during that final phase forms one of the finest chapters in the history of English journalism.

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HYWEL WILLIAMS

Hywel Williams is an historian and commentator. His books include: Age of Chivalry: culture and power in medieval Europe; Emperor of the West: Charlemagne and the Carolingian empire; Cassell's Chronology of World History; dates, events and ideas that made history; Days that Changed the World; Sun Kings: a history of kingship; In Our Time: speeches that shaped the modern world; Guilty Men: Conservative decline and fall; Britain's Power Elites: the rebirth of a ruling class.